Thursday, December 27, 2012

Often times when I find myself in a conversation about Privacy, there's a lack of clarity around what exactly we're discussing. It's widely accepted that people who are experts on privacy all speak the same language and have the same goals.

I'm not so sure this is true.

This came up in a discussion with Jishnu yesterday, and we needed a common starting place. So I'd like to take a little time to lay out what I'm thinking when I talk about Privacy, especially since I'm mainly focused on empowering individuals with control over data sharing and not so much on keeping secrets.

Privacy is the ability for an individual to have transparency, choice, and control over information about themselves.

At the risk of sounding too cliché, I'm gonna use a pyramid to explain my thinking. There are three parts to establishing privacy:

First, an organization's (or individual's) collection, sharing and use of data must be transparent. This is crucial because choice and control cannot be realized without honesty and fairness.

Second, individuals must be provided choice. This means data subjects (those people whose data is being collected, used or shared) must be able to understand what's going to happen with their data and have the ability to provide dissent or consent.

Third, when it's clear what's happening and individuals have an understanding about what they want, they must be given controlover collection, sharing or use of the data in question.

This means control depends on choice which depends on transparency. You cannot make decisions unless you're given the facts. You cannot make your desires reality unless you've decided what you want.

For the engineers out there (like me), this dependencies can be modeled as such:

Control is the goal, but it requires Transparency and Choice to work -- as well as some additional inputs. Privacy is the whole thing: all three pieces acting together with support from both data controllers and data subjects to empower individuals with a say in how their data is used.

The privacy perception gap is a symptom of ineffective transparency and choice; it is the result of peoples' inability to really understand what's going on so they have no chance to establish positions about what is okay. When transparency and choice are built into a system, the gap shrinks and people have most of what they need to regain control over their privacy.